In 1974, Joe Walsh‘s daughter Emma Kristen died in a car accident on her way to her nursery school. “My wife [Stefany Rhodes] was taking our 4-year-old daughter to school and some lady ran a stop sign and creamed our car,” remembered Walsh. “And I lost my daughter. And it was gory and all that. To help with closure, I wrote this song for her. And over the process of the next year, my wife and I, we just weren’t strong enough to get through the grief and so we separated and eventually got divorced.”
In dealing with his grief, Walsh wrote “Song For Emma” for his daughter, the closing track on his third solo album So What.
There’s a feeling I get when I look to the sky
As if someone is watching
Someone hears every word
We are filled with regrets, it was such a short time
But we told Him we loved you, hoping somehow He heard
We hoped He heard
You were with us for a while and He took you
And He made your mama cry
I can see it in her eyes, there’s a question as to why
And after all this time still I find that I’m without an answer
Good Bye
Bye love
[RELATED: 5 Songs Joe Walsh is Proud He Wrote Before Joining the Eagles]
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Driving to Boulder Park
A decade after the release of “Song For Emma,” Walsh was on tour with Stevie Nicks and took her for a drive through the Colorado mountains. At the time, the two had been dating for a few years. Nick even called Walsh the “great, great love” of her life.
“Why do you love somebody?” said Nicks in 2007 recalling her first meeting with Walsh at the Mansions Hotel in Dallas in 1983. “Why do you love them so much that when they walk in the room your heart jumps out of your chest? I don’t know. But I fell in love with Joe at first sight from across the room, in the bar at the Mansions Hotel in Dallas.”
She added, “I looked at him and I walked across the room and I sat on the bar stool next to him, and two seconds later I crawled into his lap, and that was it.”
Nicks admitted in the liner notes for her 1991 compilation, Timespace, that during their two-hour drive, she was mostly complaining to Walsh about “inconsequential things” when he told her the story about his daughter and her death.
“I guess I had been complaining about a lot of things,” wrote Nicks. “He decided to make me aware of how unimportant my problems were if they were compared to worse sorrows. So he told me that he had taken his little girl to this magic park whenever he could, and the only thing she ever complained about was that she was too little to reach up to the drinking fountain.”
When they eventually arrived at their destination, it was Walsh’s daughter Emma’s favorite playground, North Boulder Park. Near a fountain in the park was a plaque that read: “This fountain is given in loving memory of Emma Walsh, April 29, 1971-April 1, 1974.” Walsh dedicated the memorial fountain to his daughter in May 1976.
The drive with Walsh moved Nicks so profoundly that when she sat at her piano she wrote “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You” for him in five minutes.
The closing track on her third solo album Rock a Little in 1985, Nicks called “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You” the “most committed song I ever wrote.”
Has anyone ever written anything for you?
In all your darkest hours
Have you ever heard me sing?
Listen to me now
You know I’d rather be alone
Than be without you
Don’t you know?
Has anyone ever given anything to you?
In your darkest hour
Did you ever give it back?
Well, I have
I have given that to you
If it’s all I ever do
This is your song
Nicks added, “Nothing in my life ever seems as dark anymore since we took that drive.”
In 2015, Nicks “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You” in an episode of American Horror Story: Coven in the episode titled “The Magical Delights of Stevie Nicks.”
Photo: Stevie Nicks in concert, November 28, 1989, Wembley Arena, London, UK by Ian Dickson/Shutterstock
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